Perhaps it’s a trend away from politically correct diversity, but in the past decade we have been treated with some engaging biographies of famous dead white men. Among those I have enjoyed are “Grant: A Biography,” by William S. McFeely, “Alexander Hamilton,” by Ron Chernow, “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” by Walter Isaacson, and “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,” by Joseph J. Ellis.
Last week I finished another, “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times,” by H.W. Brands. Jackson, whose face graces the $20 bill, comes across as the only full-bore warrior to sit in the White House. Many other presidents had commanded men in battle before entering politics, but Jackson loved conflict. He killed men in duels, and carried their bullets in his own body. He led an outnumbered rag-tag army to victory over the superpower of the day at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.
As president, he fought the financial powers of Philadelphia and New York, and paid off the national debt, since having a debt would “raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.”
In assessing Jackson, President Harry S. Truman wrote that Old Hickory’s only major mistake was the 1838 Cherokee removal from Georgia. But with all due respect to the “Trail of Tears,” I’m beginning to think that Jackson’s biggest mistake is one action that generally attracts praise.
It came when the South Carolina legislature declared that the federal tariff on foreign imports could not be collected at its harbors, and if the federal government tried to collect the lawful duties by force, such action would be “inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union.”
Jackson responded quickly and firmly. “Disunion by armed force is treason,” he announced as he dispatched warships and mobilized soldiers. Meanwhile the tariff was reduced, giving the Palmetto State hotheads a face-saving way to back down, and South Carolina was kept in the union.
But was that really a benefit to the United States? Many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, but they believed that slavery was immoral and that some future generation would find a way to eliminate it.
Then came Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who constructed elaborate arguments that slavery was a moral good and should be expanded. Without Calhoun’s persistent rhetoric in the nation’s capital, that evil might have been seen as an evil, and eradicated sooner rather than later.
South Carolina was the first to secede after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. If it had already been out of the Union, struggling along as a tiny realm, it might not have been able to lead the way for the other cotton states, and we might not have suffered a Civil War.
During that conflict, South Carolina was duly chastised by the army of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and unfortunately restored to the Union.
It was the home state of Strom Thurmond, the “Dixiecrat” candidate for president in 1948. He maintained that racial segregation was an important part of the fight against Communism, which is the sort of vile argument that poisons political discourse.
Had South Carolina remained out, John McCain might well be president of the United States today. He was a leading Republican candidate in 2000, until the South Carolina primary. Rumors were spread that the McCains’ adopted Bangladeshi child was actually his own illegitimate black child – something that worked to kill his candidacy in South Carolina.
Scanning recent news from that state, I find Bible classes proposed in public high schools, a plan to apply the death penalty even more broadly, and the “Christian Exodus” scheme to produce a theocracy there.
It’s obvious that Andrew Jackson didn’t do America any favors by keeping South Carolina in the Union. As one sensible resident remarked after the 1860 secession vote, the state is “too large to be a lunatic asylum and too small to be a republic.” Today we would be better off it it had been allowed to go its own way without infecting the rest of the country.
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
